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After ruling on January 6 that Chicago’s ban on firearm sales is unconstitutional, Federal Judge Edward Chang of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division granted a 180-day corrective ordinance implementation delay. The decision is particularly noteworthy in affirming Second Amendment rights in the nation’s “murder capitol”, a city correspondingly known for the nation’s toughest gun laws.

Chicago’s latest defeat of efforts to keep guns out of its law-abiding resident’s hands follows previous setbacks. First, a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision rendered a decades-old ban on handgun ownership unenforceable. Then last year a federal appeals court forced Illinois legislators to adopt a law allowing residents to carry concealed weapons. This largely stripped officials in Chicago and surrounding Cook County of their authority to regulate guns. Chicago residents had previously been required to apply for concealed-carry permits through the police superintendent.

Although a legal appeal of the latest ruling by Judge Chang is still possible, there is no indication that Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration plans to do so. Instead, presumably determining that high court-recognized Second Amendment protections are here to stay, they requested and were granted time for the City Council to prepare for compliance.

City Attorney Drew Worsek said that a full six months was needed because issues surrounding the change are complicated. This is because enactment of a new ordinance will have many components, including zoning, licensing and operational requirements for gun dealers as well as “robust regulations targeting illegal sales and transfer practices.”

Judge Chang noted in his ruling that Chicago’s gun ban covered not only federally licensed firearms dealers, but even gun transfers through gifts among family members. His 35-page opinion observes that while protecting residents is one of the fundamental duties fundamental duties of government:“…on the other side of this case is another feature of government: certain fundamental rights are protected by the Constitution, put outside government’s reach, including the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense under the Second Amendment.”

The judge wrote that long-standing restrictions on who may legally acquire and sell firearms already exist. Examples include bans on purchases by felons and mentally ill individuals, along with licensing requirements for commercial sales.

Then, in a big clincher, Judge Chang wrote: “But Chicago’s ordinance goes too far in outright banning legal buyers and legal dealers from engaging in lawful acquisitions and lawful sales of firearms, and at the same time the evidence does not support that the complete ban sufficiently furthers the purposes that the ordinance tries to serve. For the specific reasons explained later in this opinion, the ordinances are declared unconstitutional.” This is because through applying a standard deemed “almost strict scrutiny”, there is an absence of evidence that the city’s restrictions on transfers have actually helped to reduce gun violence which had been declared as the intended goal.

Last year Chicago led the nation in the number of homicides (although Philadelphia led in murder rate per population percentage). And despite of the nation’s toughest gun laws, the city saw homicides jump to more than 500 in 2012 over 2011, a 15% hike in a single year. Up to 80 percent of Chicago’s murders and non-fatal shootings are gang- related, primarily young Black and Hispanic men killed by other Black and Hispanic men. We can be quite certain that few if any of those guns were purchased legally or transferred by family members who lawfully obtained them.

Chicago law department spokesman Roderick Drew apparently agrees that most of those guns are obtained illegally, but argues that’s because restrictions still aren’t severe enough. He stated: “Every year Chicago police recover more illegal guns than officers in any city in the country, a factor of lax federal laws as well as lax laws in Illinois and surrounding states related to straw purchasing and the transfer of guns.” Drew concluded: “We need stronger gun safety laws, not increased access to firearms within the city.”

What Drew’s argument fails to explain is why Chicago’s gun assault and homicide rate is so much higher than other locales which haven’t imposed draconian firearms purchase and ownership restrictions. Nor does it address needs and rights of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves from armed violence.

Stricter gun laws offer little protection from those who are lawless, or to those who are at greatest victimization risk. In Chicago that largest at-risk population is minority youth. Gwainevere Catchings Hess, president of the Black Women’s Agenda (BWA) Inc., an organization that strongly advocates strict gun-control legislation, rightly points out that: “In 2009, Black males ages 15-19 were eight times as likely as White males the same age, and 2.5 times as likely as their Hispanic peers to be killed in a gun homicide.”

Those are terrible statistics, but here are some others. Today, 72% of Black children are born out of wedlock, as are 53% of Hispanic children and 36% of White children. Back in 1965, 25% of Black children were born out of wedlock, nearly one-third fewer. As a result, promiscuous rappers, prosperous dope peddlers and street gang leaders are becoming ever more influential role models. It’s probably no big stretch of imagination to correlate such grossly disproportionate crime and victimization rates with comparably staggering rates of single-parent families, those without fathers in particular.

As for gun access, the differences are far more profound. Whereas Chicago (which has banned concealed carry) and Houston (which has not), the former has no gun stores, while the latter has more than 180 which are specifically dedicated for that purpose. That number doesn’t include another 1,500 or so places where firearms can be legally purchased, including Walmart, K-mart, and various sporting goods retailers. So if legal gun purchase access is really a contributing factor, isn’t it remarkable then to find that Chicago’s 2012 homicide number exceeded 500 (18.7 per 100K population), whereas Houston’s was about 200 (60% less)?